Even if E. Jean Carroll's wins her civil case claiming ex-President Donald Trump raped her and then defamed her by denying it, the core of the Republican Party is not going to care, wrote the editor of the New Republic Monday.
"Senator X, Representative Y, a jury in New York has just in essence agreed with E. Jean Carroll that your party’s presidential frontrunner raped her. Is that okay?" wrote Michael Tomasky.
"We know what the answers will be. The main answer will be, “Oh, so sorry, I gotta run,” as the doors on the Senate subway quietly close. A second answer will be, “I have to run to a meeting.” A third answer will be, “I dispute your phrasing, this was just a defamation case, no more.
"These will all be pathetic responses. But they won’t be anywhere near as sickening as the fourth response, which will emanate from the likes of Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Matt Gaetz. That response will be something like: “This was a rigged case from the start! Of course, a bunch of Manhattan liberals found for the woman. Donald Trump is an innocent man!”
Tomasky said that, if Carroll wins her case, the Republican base will paint Trump as the victim of a corrupt system aiming to crucify him – and they will use a court's ruling in favor of a woman claiming he raped her to build support for him.
"The base will not abandon Trump over this, because for the base, the storyline in the event of an adverse finding by this jury is already chiseled into stone – liberal court, woke jury, et cetera," he wrote.
"In this sense it hardly even matters if Fox turns on Trump at this point and decides to take a stand. Anyway, we’ve seen that movie, and they won’t. Those Dominion depositions told us everything we need to know about Fox and its “stands.”
He said if a majority of Republican senators were willing to group together and say enough, then that would perhaps stop Trump. But, he said, that has no chance of happening in today's Republican Party.
"We know the truth here, which is that there’s a greater chance of Prince Charles pre-abdicating the throne than there is of invertebrate Republicans doing that," he wrote. "There’s also the reality of the Republican Party’s broad attitude toward women’s rights and autonomy. Abortion, rape…stop all that whining."
He concluded: "Fully 15 percent of all women in America have been raped. One in six. There are around 300,000 rapes a year in this country. That’s 820 a day.
"E. Jean Carroll says that one of them, on one day, was committed by a man who might be heading a presidential ticket. If a jury of his peers believes her, will his party care at all?"
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